Libertarian thinking about everything.
--Ere he shall lose an eye for such a trifle... For doing deeds of nature! I'm ashamed. The law is such an ass. -- G. Chapman, 1654.

Jul 30, 2010

Many things are now very clean here at NEF Headquarters, particularly the command van and outside decks. The Plan of the Day includes squeaky cleaning the truck transport section, along with a portion of the base maintenance/administration building prior to exterior painting.

This makes your Commandante feel good, but PsyOps cautions him that the novelty of the new power washer will, in due course, wear off.

And that pretty much exhausts my fund of Chinese language skills. Oh, I know a few Cantonese words that are supposed to request a package of cigarettes, but they were taught to me by an impish Russian/Chinese girl in Hong Kong who was not above a little joke. For all I know she was having me tell the shopkeeper that I desired a bowl of bat feet garnished with navel lint.

These quirky memories were triggered by the morning news report that China has become the world's No.2 economy -- our chief competitor. For the sake of my grandsons' future, I hope we are keeping track of the dragon with an appetite for lebensraum. I hope we are carefully watching the the strange machinations of the Communist capitalists in the Forbidden City and the Capitalist communists down around Shanghai.

But I wonder. Do what ever you want with these fun facts:

China's GDP now exceeds every nation but our own. Spain and Latin American aren't even in the running. Spanish is, by millions of students, the most studied foreign language in the United States.

And then there's France, and when's the last time you heard of a French accomplishment except the annual public relations explosion celebrating their successful sale of another year's worth of pre-nubile Beaujolais to American naifs? French is the second most studied language here.

Students of Chinese don't make a blip on the charts.

Mon Dieu! I thought this was the kind of disconnect between the real world and the publik skul classroom we'd never have to worry about once we got a cabinet-level Department of Education.

And so the judge says "no" to Arizona. By extension, the denial of local authority here also applies to at least eight other states who are in one stage or another of doing as Arizona tried to do.

It's tempting to get off a line or two about Judge Bolton as a Clinton appointee, but she was nominated by John Kyl, who sports the sanity of a Midwest upbringing. His dad even performed as an Iowa congresscritter (R) and was not indicted.

The lawsuit will proceed at a boring pace now, but there is a lively battle for public opinion worth our attention. The AP, and others, speculate this morning that Judge Susan is telegraphing a message that that the Obama Administration will not tolerate uppitiness from the states. The item cautions that her suspension of all that really matter in the Arizona immigration law will chill similar sentiments on other states.

Could be, Could also not be. It depends on how serious we slathering freedom-freak libertarian types are about nullification, and here I stand on the brink of a dangerous position. Nullification has an ugly ring of facile nostalgia for the days of black slavery. So does its cousin, interposition. Neither doctrine justifies defending a massa-servant relationship of one class of American citizens to another nor of the old Jim Crow laws, nor of government-mandated racial segregation. Nullification, as the term is used here, is not a means of attacking a race; it is an ambition to protect a nation.

It may bring life to a theoretical dispute about the the right of a political subdivision of the United States to protect its citizens from a serious local threat, even though the peril may result from politically inspired federal action, or inaction.

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Citizens of basket-cases posing as countries flee their thug-ridden homes to places like The United States because they are driven by economic desperation, and because they lack the will to organize for the redemption of their own home lands. They find it more convenient to follow the coyote across the border to a place where the natives have already made the necessary sacrifices to create a land of relative freedom and opportunity.

The crossing is, of course, illegal. National law makes it so. We were told repeatedly that the people of Arizona enacted a border control measure which mirrors the federal statutes only because Obama and his predecessors, hand-in-hand with rabbitty national legislators, lacked the courage to enforce the laws they, themselves, enacted to re-assume control of our southern boundary.

As the case oozes through the court system, perhaps the Arizona body politic could instruct its law enforcers to suspend dwelling on the statute Judge Susan finds wanting.

The first difficulty I see with this form of practical nullification is perhaps one hundred thousand criminal complaints making an untidy mess in the office of the federal attorney for Arizona between now and Labor Day. If this happens, I will lose no time in sending him a card expressing my profound sympathy.

Laboring the obvious, the victim of whatever theft he committed was the Republic he has sworn to serve, term after term after term.

One of the questions this raises is how this opportunistic octogenarian got away with it for so long. I'm sure it could have nothing to do with a New York (et al.) press corps slavishly devoted to any politician adored by a substantial and monolithic sub-culture satisfied to be, economically, little more than well-slopped hogs.

In case you missed a recent little essay here, this is the fellow who thinks he is qualified to write a law ordering your children into two years of lightly sugar-coated slavery.

This perennial is back under the name of the "Universal National Service Act" of 2010. As usual its time has not yet come, but that doesn't keep our home-grown authoritarians from trying. When they get their way, every young American (up to the somewhat un-young age of 42) will be conscripted for service to The American Crown. It restores the military draft, and adds a novel feature -- erasing that language of the 14th Amendment barring involuntary servitude.

If you can't or won't pick up a gun, Uncle Sam will put you to work enforcing the law, rooting out terrorists (a term conveniently undefined in the bill), or laboring on public works projects.

It is a relic of the enchantment of our senior elected statists for the1920s and 30s when the USSR persuaded our intellectual elite of the beauty of an entire national population marching in lockstep toward a glorious future under a Glorious Leader. Skeptics, and especially individualists, were not excepted, and the posters of the period continue to inspire the likes of Charlie (I didn't steal nothin') Rangel.

Congressman Rangel, Democrat of Harlem, heir to the toolbox of Adam Clayton Powell, is the sponsor of this bill, just as was been for its 2006 and 2008 incarnations. His co-sponsors in previous years have included congress critter Yvette Clark who is widely known as the Democrat from Flatbush who has a great deal of trouble remembering if she graduated from college and, if so, which one, Oberlin or Medgar Evers. (The answers are "no" and "neither one.")

Another earlier sponsor is our old pal James Mc Dermott, Democrat from the twee side of Seattle. You may know him as Baghdad Jim for his 2002 trip to Iraq where Babylonian delights were said to paid for by Saddam Hussein's spies.

Look, there are 535 men and women in Congress, and only a handful are mentioned here in relationship to the universal service scheme which serves as the factual basis for accusations that His Obamaness wants a massive corps of civilians under his personal command. In fact, not enough of the 535 buy into this putative New American Order enough to pry the bills out of committee.

But there are enough of them to frighten any thinking citizen out of his wits.

Rangel -- this year's lone sponsor of H.R. 5741 -- may, but probably won't, be booted for public malfeasance beyond the tolerance of even his Capitol colleagues. He may leave voluntarily when the heat is turned up. But even if he somehow departs, the statist dream remains alive and well on the miasmic Potomac banks.

It may be that we are just one more economic implosion away from having universal serfdom start looking pretty good to the folks who want a chicken in the pot and the trains to run on time.

Jul 27, 2010

I'm making a stuffed pepper for breakfast* and needed only a half-can of diced tomatoes for the filling. I dumped the other half into the blender for juice. Then my eye fell on a few leftover bacon slices from last night's snack. Hmmm. Tossed them in.

I am here to tell you, friends and neighbors, that this is well worth doing, a sort of bacon and tomato sandwich in glass. Next time I will see what happens if I add ice, the tiniest dribble of Tabasco, celery salt, and an adequate measure of vodka.

Assange and his whistle blowers seem to belong to that gentle school of tender souls who want us all to believe that casualties are an unnecessary result of war.

They would think it peachy keen if each SOF squad included a lawyer, a sociologist, a cultural anthropologist, and an ethicist in general practice to determine if our riflemen have a moral justification for shooting back. Plus, of course, Geraldo Rivera with a camera crew to make sure everyone is an honest as he is about what really happened in the firefight.

On the other hand, why is it immoral or unpatriotic for Americans to learn that our presumptive ally, Pakistan, and our putative enemy, the Taliban, seem to be spending a good deal of time conspiring against us? Or that the government we are propping up with young American lives is studded with moral cretinism?

Does the American Republic fall dead of shock to learn that its high military command is occasionally guilty of asinine decisions? Is there any chance at all that if political administratons leveled with their people that fewer idiocies would be committed in the peoples' name?

Pistol to my head and ordered to cheer one side or another, I guess it would be: "Go Wikileak."

Jul 23, 2010

Bet the farm that every serious gun enthusiast has a fantasy of walking into a thrift store or garage sale and finding a box of shooting goodies marked $5. Couple of 1911s, most of an artillery Luger, a Pederson device. The best that has happened to me in the past few years is a pretty good WW2 issue shoulder holster for the S&W Victory (Model 10) from a DAV shop over on the Mississippi River. Three bucks including a second non-descript holster.

1. The man whose surname I bear, and whose direct descendant I am, was born in Kilkinney. He was in the colonies in time fight the King with the Virginia Continental Line.

2. Across the Irish Sea from G+/Grandpa John's birth place, William Pitt the Elder, First Earl of Chatham, wrote a mighty paragraph.

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail - its roof may shake - the wind may blow through it - the storm may enter - the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter."

Thank you both.

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(Simply reading the Pitt dicta is well enough, but for the full impact you should find a recording of that old ham actor Sam Ervin declaiming it during the Watergate Hearings.)

In its morning report of Boss Rangel's plan to proclaim himself ethically pure, AP segues over to the effect of the ethics charges on House Democrats' re-election campaigns. The wire service then enlightens us with:

"Democrats will have to defend their party's conduct. If enough of them lose, the party could cede control of the House."

This feature is late this week, so, by way of apology, a twofer is on the block.

You can use the XP 100 barrel to make a pistol -- or a rifle that will incite the BATF to tax you and Nancy Pelosi to denounce you. It is hand-stamped ".223." I suppose we're talking about a .223 Remington rechambering job, but I actually know nothing, not even why or where I picked this thing up.

The other vintage gun iron is a well-patina-ed old Flaubert action which actually still does everything it was designed to do. You can make a parlor rifle. Or a super-sneaky pest gun. (Most of these things were designed for .22 caps only.) Or hang it on your wall until you're as tired of looking at it as I am.

Swaps only, No money. See the rules here and previous offerings by clicking on the "Swap Me" label below.

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It would be nice to have a set of Lyman mold handles (small) around here, not to mention some Lee double-cavity molds for .38/.357.

Sunday afternoon. Just left of the standing cottonwood is a busy canal entrance to West Okoboji. The storm dropped another tree directly across the canal, bringing boat traffic to a halt.

Two neighborhood guys took a look and talked it over. They concluded that it would be a nice libertarian thing to do to cut it up and haul it out, saving days or weeks of bureaucratic wrangling about whose responsibility it was.

Assembling a chain saw, a small I/O runabout, and a length of 3/4-inch nylon, they turned to.

Two or three hours later the tree was as you see it in the top photo (dragged out by hand over the canal sea wall ) and bottom shot -- towed trough the canal to a place where the pair could get a line on it from the pickup to drag the big stem out.

Some tourist folks were helpful from one side of the canal. On the other an apparently healthy middle-age fellow followed the action sporadically from the patio of his impressive lake home (which had become less impressive due to the tree in his adjacent waters.) His assistance consisted of occasionally turning from his newspaper to frown importantly and make small gestures of disapproval when some move of the two men in the water struck him as unwise. This is a fellow who should pray nightly that he never needs the help of his neighbors.

After the last of the cottonwood was high and dry, one of the perps allowed as how even without alligators, this wasn't something he'd care to do for a living.

This isn't the worst damage that can be shown, but it is representative of what the Saturday Night Storm did on West Okoboji. Here in Terrace Park, boat, dock, and hoist claims will be in the seven figures.

Jul 18, 2010

One heck of a storm whacked my area about 10:30 last evening. The general opinion is no tornado, just sustained straight-line winds approaching 100 miles per hour.

I lucked out with very minor damage, though the cleanup will occupy the next two or three days.

Not more than a mile away, however, there is enough tree, boat, dock, and dwelling damage to keep a couple of platoons of insurance adjusters and a regiment of carpenters, mechanics, landscape guys, and chain saw artists busy for a long time.

Which in my book proves God is better at creating your basic economic stimulus program than His Obamaness, and Chucky Schumer put together.

Okay, so I have a little weakness for cheese cake, but there's a journalistic reason for inviting your attention to this because, a while back, someone was jerking gunchick chains about tactical undies --presumably mythical -- for concealed carry.

What you lewdies are looking for is toward the end of the pictures, but on the way you'll find some funny tactical concepts.

The Indianapolis Star may or may not have been a "great" newspaper, but a little more than a generation back Eugene C.Pulliam made it a highly respected one, a professional journal controlled by professional editors.

Pulliam is spinning in his grave. He considered his opinion and editorial pages centerpieces of the great national debates among literate people interested in public policy. His commentary was cheerfully nonpartisan, attached to but not in bed with the kind of conservatism represented by men like Barry Goldwater.

Roberta keys on the primary sadness here. The media have only the lowest opinion of your intelligence and mine. Gannett controllers seem convinced you and I have never read a book cover-to-cover. Or perhaps they concede we may be part of the small, strange cult of word readers but understand that the big money is made in pandering to the comic-book class.

Jul 14, 2010

In quest of greater accuracy, I have successfully completed installation of a trigger shoe on that Colt I couldn't shoot yesterday. Yes, it, too, was in the junk box. Yes, the hardest part was finding a hex wrench small enough. No, I won't bet much that it will, by itself, substantially improve my groups, but I do like shoes.

(You can't see it, but the shoe is stamped "Herter's," so you know I am not trying to mislead you with hokum.)

Jul 13, 2010

Impromptu range trip this morning, and I am glad no one else was there to witness my humiliation writ large in .45 ACP. Alibis galore are available and are mostly true, but nothing excuses three magazines --- 21 rounds -- spread out over 11 or 12 inches at 50 yards. The ammo was miscellaneous junk, but that accounts for only a little.

Yes, two-handed. Yes, seated at shooting table.

This lad is resolved to shoot more.

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--I do like the gun, the SS Colt Series 70 built after the company decided to tell the panicky lawyers to get lost. The action is still stiff and the recoil spring feels too heavy, but it handled everything I fed it, from some light semi-wadcutter target loads up to the muscle stuff I loaded recently. I will do a little trigger work.

--The muscle stuff is a 230-grain lead round nose over 6.3 grains of Unique, and I am going to back off a bit for everyday shooting. It's under the recommended maximum but noticeably zippier than the military load and not a lot of fun for casual shooting.

--The jury is still out on whether I keep the barrel collet. I had intended to go back to John Browning's (PBUH) bushing system, but, as I said, this lashup gave me no trouble. We'll see after a few hundred more rounds.

Jul 12, 2010

Breda doesn't even know I owe her a favor. She needed a few rounds of semi-oddball ammunition. I pawed through one of my junk boxes to see if I could help (couldn't, really) and stumbled across a set of as-new walnut "target" grips for the recently acquired Colt Huntsman. They're the kind of quality guys like Gil Hebard used to sell.

I didn't know I had them, and if I had not been mining .38 SW rounds it might have been months or years before I tripped over the grips.

They look and feel right, so I'll leave them on for shooting. The plastic originals get cached against the unlikely chance I'll want to sell or swap her to a Colt collector. Those guys are daffy for ponies.

Jul 11, 2010

Another offering from the Camp J box of gun-freak treasures for which I have no use.

What have you for the grand old American sport of swapping?

This gizmo is a new Lee Ram Primer. It lets you seat primers on the upstroke of your press. The good folks at Lee make all sorts of promises for it, stopping, however, somewhat shy of a pledge that it will take you to victory at Camp Perry. For Lee presses only.

Jul 9, 2010

I was a good green guy when the elected and appointed nincompoops decided all U.S. toilets should operate on one-point-three thimblesful per cycle. I wrote nothing and said barely a word. That may have been due less to concern for Mother Earth than to the fact that I have an older house with pre-Gore crappers.

But now that one of the old girls has a complete overhaul, I protest. Replace the valves, filler tube, flapper, and float in a good ol' American toilet from the Eisenhower regime and you're back to a thimble and a third. The predictable residual turd floats obnoxiously and the retry slips your mind until you happen to think of it just as the new girl friend heads for your bathroom for the first time.

Carrying a weapon is fine for adults who understand what they're doing. Carrying both a weapon and a chip on shoulder is not fine. One or two people will know why I feel compelled to note this now, and they won't say anything about it.

Joel says he generally avoids politics because of such slimy decisions. I'm of another opinion, though I do concede that trying to be an effective political fighter for good things is a lot like trying to be an honest cop in Chicago. .

Jul 8, 2010

In a county near me the sheriff just loved a citizen named Paul Dorr as long as Paul was spending his idle time protesting abortion clinics. In those days, Sheriff Douglas Weber gave Mr. Dorr his CCW every year. No problem.

This suggests some personnel actions. Sherf Weber should be reassigned as a school crossing guard. Judge Bennett would look handsome in the robs of a Supreme Court justice, way better than wazzername.

The AP gave Weber a chance to tell his side of the tale, but he decided to keep still. I think I would too.

EDIT AND UPDATE: This case has wider implications than we thought. A more complete report makes it clear the federal judge raked Sheriff Weber for depriving Mr. Dorr of his Second Amendment rights because he objected to Dorr exercising his First Amendment rights. And for being considered "weird" by some members sof the community. Maybe this one will become famous as the Great Iowa Right to be Weird Decision.

This is for those of you just now returning to Earth on a flight out of Uranus or somewhere. The jobs recovery occurred because hundreds of thousands of persons were hired by the feds to make a nuisance of themselves on your doorstep. What color are ya'? Where else do y'all sleep? You owe money on your house?

Most of them are laid off by now, and the jobs numbers are back to the dismality we've come to expect.

Jul 7, 2010

That's how the serious casting cats spell it on the internet, and now your humble scribe has 168,000 grains of a lead-like boolit material cast into little Lyman ingots and shelved. Not allowing for waste, that's seven hundred and thirty -- 230 grainers for the 1911s with a few ounces left over for crappie jigs.

Before long I'll have a report on the casting, loading, and shooting qualities we can get from modern wheel weights fired as cast with either no lube or a light hand lube. I am not hot to get into the sizing and lubing game. If the as-cast stuff will hit the barn door and not lead the bores too badly, I won't.

The men of the family spent one of the Independence weekend afternoons at Cabela's in the Twin Cities, and I finally just tossed frugality to the winds and bought the Lyman kit with the little "Big Dipper" 10-pound pot. High quality it is not, but it should make all the boolits I care to shoot, swap, or give away.

(If you're out at my local DNR range some weekday afternoon and see a crazy dude raking lead from the berms, don't shoot. That's me.)

EDIT: Heading off an argument, perhaps: By "modern" wheel weights I mean the ones still based on lead. In the 80s when I was last casting, we considered wheel weights to be about 90-95 per cent lead with the balance more or less evenly split between tin and antimony. Serious, or just anal, casters added enough tin to bring it closer to Lyman's No. 2 formula of 90 - 5 - 5 (lead, tin,antimony). I have read that most WW makers have by now cut the tin content to nearly nothing.

Others made the good point that citing precise contents of any home-brew alloy was somewhat silly because we had no idea of what was actually in the lead, the tin, or the antimony we used. And who the heck had a Brinnel tester in his shop? We considered anything that cast smoothly and was hard enough to resist fingernail denting good enough to use.

Jul 6, 2010

The Mexican politicians have issued an official statement praising His Obamaness for suing Arizona. Wouldn't they just.

Obama openly avows his purposes include handcuffing other states who want to succeed (where Obama has failed) in controlling illegal immigrants. Thus it is fair to say that Barack Obama, in the 18th month of his presidency, celebrated United States Independence Week by suing the citizens of his own Republic, thus earning the approval of foreign thugs.

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One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. -- H.L. Mencken

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...the Constitution was made to guard thepeople against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." Daniel Webster

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EMAIL --alongfordmick(at)yahoo(dot)com

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Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."– H.L. Mencken,